Zana's Child and Old Neanderthal Crosses

Above right, Zana the Wild Woman and at right, photo said to be of her son Khvit. Below, Myra Shackley's photo of Igor Burtsev with the skull of Khvit. All of these photos are from Igor Burtsev, reprinted by permission. Below Igor are two views of the skull.

There was some controversy about theskull of Khvit, allegedly the son of a local man and Zana, a captive Wild Woman in the area of the Caucasus mountains in the late 1800s. There were some statements that the skull had some Neanderthal traits, and against this the skull was said to look like n Australoid (Australian Aboriginal) I could tell at once that certain specific features of the skull were Neanderthaloid and nothing like an Australian Aboriginal. Among these are the flattened vault with a low rise in back and low forehead, a rounded transverse section of the cranium, large rounded eye sockets and arched brow ridges above them, and the specific type of mandible with an elongated and backward-slantinting ramus in back (In many Neanderthals this elongation makes a considerable gap between the last molar tooth and the ascending ramus in the back of the jaw) Although the skull overall is of the modern human type, it has a distinctive Neanderthal appearance, including the view from in front and face-on.

It has been known for a long time that several of the earliest modern human skulls from the Mid-East had the look of Neanderthals crossed with regular human beings, and the example usually shown is the skull number 5 found at the excavation of the Skhul cave (Cave of the goat) in what was then Palestine. I would say Khvit was comparable to these Skhul crossbreeds in many ways. These men of the Skhul cave were tall, as big as Cro-Magnons and over six feet tall. It is thought that their increased height came about because some of the Out of Africa humans were also thought to be very tall, along the lines of the modern Watusi. 

 

Incidentally one of the early types of Paleo-Indians had very large skulls and were identified by Neumann as Otamids. I have spoken of them before because their skulls had a mixture of Neanderthal and CroMagnon (Indian) features and they are frequently cited in stories of "Giants found in mound burials". They were the common type all over much of North America and even parts of South America until they were displaced and absorbed by more recent populations. But these skulls also have many of the same traits of Skhul and Khvit's skull. in the news article below a date of 35000 years old for the level of the burial had been suggested for this case, but the skull type persisted for a long time until very recently in many parts of the United States.

Petra co Oase "Earliest modern human in Europe" and  Shanidar Neanderthal from Mid-East
As you can see the overall form of the outline is much the same and the two are doubtless related through some degree of intermixing. Below, the Shanidar skull from face-on view.

 

Actual anthropologial illustration of an Australian aboriginal's skull. The braincase is characteristically high and narrow, with a comparatively low and broad face. The top of the skull has a sort of a ridge along the top.The lower jaw does not have that peculiar elongation and slant to the ramus. Although the brow ridges are developed, both the brow ridges and the eye sockets are of the typical "Modern" form, as opposed to the Neanderthals where the eye sockets tend to be distinctively rounded and the brow ridges arched over them. (Compare the Shanidar skull above the two views of the Australian Aboriginal skull.) Neither Khvit's skull nor the Skhul skull had anything of the typical Australoid abut the,. Otamid skulls are also called "Australoid" in the literature and the use of the term is mistaken in those cases also.

 

Below, Night Cam "Bigfoot" photo from a facebook group clearly showing a creature with much the same kind of cranium as Khvit and the Skhul types. And below that, the reconstructions by Harvey Pratt also show the same type of head.

Larry Surface, Ohio Night Cam BF photo

Harvey Pratt Forensic Artist drawing of Eastern Bigfoot type

Pennsylvania BF Track resembling Neanderthal tracks but much larger.
Also from a Facebook discussion group about Bigfoot.

Russian publications listing for Igor Burtsev's notice on Khvit's Skull:
http://www.stgr-primates.de/news.html#skulls

Scytho-Sarmatian Sea Monsters from the Ukraine

Following up on some recent postings on Scythians, Sarmations and the reality of Amazons on another blog, I have some illustrations left over relating to Water Monsters in Scythian and Sarmatian culture"Dolphin" but it is one that shows strikingly UN-dolphinlike features of the head and pectoral fins. I have always thought that in such depictions, the artist is really thinking of Beluga sturgeon.I believe that there are some very old Indo-European words which were ancestral to later "Whale" and "Dolphin" names such as the Greek Ketos (Cetus) but that the original reference was to Beluga sturgeonians, Sarmations and Proto-Indo-Europeans, this geographically relates to the modern Ukraine (Southern Russia)

A Water Horse or Hippocampus. this case once again I think this is based on a swimming moose: the forefoot in the middle seems to have cloven hoofs and I am thinking the "Rear Fin" represents a hind leg, also with a cloven hoof. unning "Minimal Seamonster" statistics in the "Longnecked" and "Waterhorse" categories and I was very surprised to find that the smallest-ize category of reports are describing a creature consistently between ten and fifteen feet long, sometimes as much as twenty feet long, but with a head and neck estimated as only four to six feet long, with a head two or three feet long-the whole creature very hoselike and with the head the size of a horse, and typically with one or two humps on the back. This minimum dimensions sighting is reported in Europe, Asia and North America, and offshore out to sea only slightly, and the dimensions match those of a moose (Elk) within a reasonable margin for error. This also matches the corresponding sightings on land, such as at Loch Ness up to 1934.

The Sarmatians were famous for using a dragon military standard that was a sort of an ornamental head with an attached wind sock. In this case the head is distinctively crocodylian and I can only surmise it depicts a Medcroc in the Black Sea end of the range (Historical reports from Turkey require that the crocs  entered the rivers via the Black Sea) and that the jagged comb on top of the head means to illustrate the ridge on its back and tail. This is nothing to do with the Pskov crocodiles as a Cryptid category, Pskov is in NORTH Russia.

Bigfoot Evidence: Bigfoot News

Bigfoot Evidence
Wednesday, December 19, 2012

The Bigfoot Report - Bigfoot News #8 - Fox the Dying Bigfoot, Jane Goodall, Russian Yeti

Story of Fox the dying Bigfoot hits the web. Jane Goodall calls out China and new Russian hopping Bigfoot video gets some buzz.

Click Here

For my part, I'd have to agree that everyone is far too relaxed in video, including the dog, and that is suspicious. The figure that runs by and pretends to be an ape (NOT "Pretends to be a Bigfoot") seems to be a person in ordinary clothing before they dash across the opening.

Wooly Mammoth Sighted in Siberia

From The Sun:

'Woolly mammoth' spotted in Siberia

Shock footage ... 'woolly mammoth' crossing river

Barcroft Media

By STAFF REPORTER

Published: 08th February 2012

A BEAST lurches through icy waters in a sighting a paranormal investigator thinks could prove woolly mammoths are not extinct after all.

The animal – thought to have mostly died out roughly 4,000 years ago – was apparently filmed wading through a river in the freezing wilds of Siberia.
The jaw-dropping footage was caught by a government-employed engineer last summer in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug region of Siberia, it is claimed.
summer in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug region of Siberia, it is claimed.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4116326/Woolly-mammoth-spotted-in-Siberia.html

Video: The 'woolly mammoth' alive

ANIMAL previously thought extinct apparently filmed crossing icy river

He filmed the elephant-sized creature as it struggled against the racing water.

Its hair matches samples recovered from mammoth remains regularly dug up from the permafrost in frozen Russia.
The official was reportedly in the area surveying for a planned road.
Paranormal writer Michael Cohen said: "Rumours of a handful of mammoths still kicking around in the vast wilderness of Siberia have been circulating for decades and occasionally sightings by locals have occurred.
"Siberia is an enormous territory and much of it remains completely unexplored and untouched by humans. "
Woolly mammoths roamed the Earth 10,000 years ago during the last Ice Age.
A small pocket remained on and around Wrangel Island, off the coast of Siberia, and these did not die out until 3,500 years ago.
Mr Cohen, 41, added: "It is highly possible that a number of species, extinct elsewhere, survive in the area.
"If surviving woolly mammoths were found in Siberia, it could run against Russia's lans to further develop and exploit the area's considerable resources.
"It would be potentially one of the greatest discoveries ever."
But viewers are divided on the nature of the animal seen in the video. Some have dismissed it as a hoax while others reckon it is an elephant lost in the Siberian wilderness. The third theory is the sighting shows a [huge] bear eating a huge fish. What do you Think?

Neolithic Neanderthals

While I was putting together materials pertaining to the spread of the Uralics and diffusion of Boreal Mesolithic cultures, A friend sent me a link which included pages from an issue of Current Anthropology on the Mesolithic of Eastern Europe. One section of one page was startling enough that I reproduce it below:

View "A" is from above and "B" is from behind: both compare well to the common Neanderthal skull traits. I have added a dotted line to indicate where I take the demarkation of the brow ridges to be. These skulls all date within the period of 2000-4500 BC generally from the indicated cultural associations. Not as recent as some of the "relic hominid" skull and skeletal materials that are suggested in the literature-some of the finds might be as recent as the 1800s in North America and that is no joke. However these examples are consistent with the pattern and add to the growing list. In both Germany and in the former Soviet Union, skull and skeletal material of the same type is also reported from the succeding Bronze Age, possibly up to as recently as 1000 BC.

In going over the other pages I also found another example that was most suggestive:

The one in the middle has predominantly Neanderthaloid traits, relieved only slightly by the bulge of the forehead. In this example and the one at top, the transverse section through the cranium is distinctly broad and round, a Neanderthal trait. In this set I would also say number 9 has some distinctly African traits and number 15 central-Asiatic of the "Premongol" series.

Best Wishes, Dale D.

Shurale

Wikipedia Article

Şüräle

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Şüräle (pronounced [ʃyræˈle]; Cyrillic: Шүрәле, also spelled Shurale in English via Russian Шурале), is a male monster (a forest demon) in Bashkir and Tatar mythology. According to legends, Şüräle lives in forests. He has long fingers, a horn on its forehead, and a woolly body. He lures victims to a thicket and tickles them to death.

Şüräle closely resembles other similar characters from the folklore such as Arçuri of the Chuvashes, Pitsen (Picen) of the Siberian Tatars and Yarımtıq of the Ural Tatars.

Inspired by the Tatar folklore, Ghabdulla Tuqay wrote a poem Şüräle^[1]. Şüräle was Tuqay's pseudonym.^{[citation needed]}

The first^{[citation needed]} Tatar ballet by Farit Yarullin had its name after Şüräle.

References

1. ^ Şüräle, Ğabdulla Tuqay, 1907

Related links

• English translation of the poem
• French translation of an article about Shurale
• Russian translation of the poem
• The Myth of Shurale

http://kazanherald.com/2012/01/22/shurale-%E2%80%94-a-tatar-yeti/

Shurale — A Tatar Yeti?

January 22, 2012

by

Edward Crabtree

 

"When the sun rose the villagers were awoken by the ghastly cries of a hairy human-like creature that had become glued to the back of one of the horses." Ines Cerro/KH.

Does Shurale, mythical creature of Tatar folklore, have something to tell us about the Russian Yeti?

The world’s media has recently zoomed in on the Kemerovo region in Siberia. There, American and Russian investigators have joined forces to find the “snyeshni chyelovyek,” the snowman, or Russia’s very own Bigfoot, which is said to stalk the area. Dogged by the inevitable hoaxes and cultural confusions, many nevertheless hope that this search begins a new period of East-West cooperation in finally trying to crack this ongoing enigma.

Russia’s involvement in the snowman problem has not always been the risible issue on the fringes that it has since become. In 1958 the Soviet government saw fit to fund a “snowman commission” to seek out the basis for Wildman’s reports which from the Pamir Mountains. This was headed by Professor B.F. Porshnev and his hypothesis was that the Russian yeti was a relic of the Neanderthal, the much sought after missing link, bridging apes and humankind. Eight years later, this idea appeared to be strengthened when another yeti-expert, Doctor Jeanne Marie Kofman, addressed the Russian Geographical society in Moscow and unveiled an identikit picture of what the snowman would look like as based on many eyewitness statements. A member of the audience then came forward to say how much this resembled the latest artist’s impression of a Neanderthal man, based on fossilized remains.

In Tibet the yeti is a quasi-mythological deity which is an inclusive part of the local Buddhist cosmology. For the Native Americans the “sasquatch” is a similar legendary creature to which magical powers are ascribed. If, indeed, there were a Neanderthal-related hominid existing on the outskirts of human society, then would not one expect the folklores of the world to tell of this? With this in mind, it is time to take a fresh look at the “shurale” of Bashkir and Tatar folklore.

Surale (Tatar: Шүрәле), seated at the right in this sculputre in central Kazan, is a Tatar and Bashkir mythical creature who according to legend lives in the forests, luring his victims and tickling them to death. Tatar poet Ğabdulla Tuqay wrote an epic poem based on the legend. Maxim Edwards/KH.

Sabirzyan Badtretdin, writing in the “Tatar Exclusive Web Gazette,” recently recounted a local tale that has been passed down from grandfathers to the current generation. According to legend, horses had been going missing from the village during the night and were discovered the following morning in an exhausted condition. As this could not be allowed to continue, the village elders were consulted as to what to do next. Their advice? To cover the horses’ saddles in tar and then to release them. Sure enough, when the sun rose the villagers were awoken by the ghastly cries of a hairy human-like creature that had become glued to the back of one of the horses. This was promptly slain and, it was, of course, recognized as being Shurale.

This macabre little account could easily be dismissed as merely a fireside tale, but it does find an echo in a better-documented story. In January 2002 the Russian Journal “Ural Stalker” carried a report by the biologist Nikolai Avdeev. This told of a Wildman who had appeared in the vicinity of Ibramigova village in the southern Urals and which had been blamed for the killing of domestic animals. This too was eventually captured and killed and was personified as shurale by the local Bashkirs. However, in this case, officials from outside the area had a chance to inspect the body. They described it as being covered in black hair, having red eyes, a pronounced brow and no forehead – and being reminiscent more of Bigfoot than of the nimble fingered horn headed Shurale.

This would not be the first time that a folk tale was found to have some grounding in fact. Vietnamese forest dwellers had long told stories of a large antelope creature which lived nearby, but this was not given credence by zoologists. After the discovery of some horns, an expedition was mounted which resulted in the discovery of the saola, a rare mammal known as the ‘Asian Unicorn’, which was only accepted by the mainstream science as late as 1992.

For the time being, in spite of the flippant attitudes towards it by many, there is an international race afoot to capture the ever elusive yeti. Just maybe, Tatarstan may hold one of the missing jigsaw pieces to this intriguing mystery.

The author, a British citizen, has been living and working in Kazan for more than two years.

Russian Relic Primate Reference Resource

Best Wishes, Dale D.

"Russia's Loch Ness Monster"

Brosno dragon
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Brosno Dragon, also known as Brosnya, is the name given to a lake monster which is said to inhabit Lake Brosno, near Andreapol in West Russia. It is described as resembling a dragon or dinosaur, and is the subject of a number of regional legends, some which are said to date back to the 13th century. [1]

.......

Legends
Rumors of a strange, giant creature living in Lake Brosno have existed for several centuries. One legend says that the lake monster scared to death the Tatar-Mongol army that headed for Novgorod in the 13th century. Batu Khan stopped the troops on the sides of Lake Brosno to rest. Horses were allowed to drink water from the lake. However, when the horses ventured down to the lake, a huge roaring creature emerged from the water and started devouring horses and soldiers. The Batu-khan troops were so terrified that they turned back, and Novgorod was saved. Old legends describe an "enormous mouth" devouring fishermen. Chronicles mention a "sand mountain" that appeared on the lake surface from time to time. According to another legend, some Varangians wanted to hide stolen treasure in the lake. When they approached the small island, a dragon came to the surface from the lake and swallowed the island up.

It was rumored in the 18th and 19th centuries that the giant creature emerged on the lake surface in the evening, but immediately submerged when people approached. It is said that during World War II the beast swallowed up a German airplane. Today, there are lots of witnesses who say they chanced to see Brosnya walking in the water. Locals say that it turns boats upside-down and has to do with disappearance of people

Theories
Many people treat the existence of Brosnya skeptically and still say that the creature may be a mutant beaver or a giant pike of 100-150 years. Others conjecture that groups of wild boars and elks cross the lake from time to time.
[emphasis added, and only the introduction to the various explanations-DD]

References
1.^ Vorotyntseva, Sofya (2004-01-20) Loch Ness Monster Has a Relative in Russian Province, Pravda













Rather than a mutant beaver explanation, I have heard that wild boars of unusually large size swimming in the water, as well as the typical swimming elk (moose) account for most modern sightings at this lake. These are the lake monster sightings that are like the ones from Loch Ness and elsewhere and cause people to think of Plesiosaurs and Brontosaurs. But they are not the origin of the large swallowing dragon.

To some extent, all bodies of water are said to suck down and drown people and animals and this is ordinarily understood as a sort of poetic mythological personification of the waters themselves. In this case, however, it becomes quite clear that what people were originally describing was a very large, very old and very evil-tempered Pike and pride in the notoriety of that pike (possibly the family of pikes even) made the locals brag and exaggerate their stotries of their monstrous pike until it could swallow up enemy warships sent against them, or Nazi planes. But the shape of the monstrously large fish on the old postcard is definietly a pike's head. Some reports of Lake Monsters from Scandinavia are also obviously such pikes, and a series of such reports occur across Canada but most prominently in the Mackenzie River system and around the Great Lakes. Some of them have been photographed and you can still always tell from the shape of the head and the conformation of the fins.

Best Wishes, Dale D.
Pike-also often at the bottom of "Out-of-Place-Crocodile" Reports.